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Since the 1960s, the British
educator, artist and theoretician Roy Ascott has been one of
Europe's most active and outspoken practitioners of interactive
computer art. Ten years before the personal computer came into
existence, Ascott saw that interactivity in computer-based forms
of expression would be an emerging issue in the arts. Intrigued
by the possibilities, he built a theoretical framework for approaching
interactive artworks, which brought together certain characteristics
of the avant-garde (Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, and
Pop Art, in particular), with the science of cybernetics championed
by Norbert Wiener.
Ascott's thesis on the
cybernetic vision in the arts, "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic
Vision" from 1966, begins with the premise that interactive
art must free itself from the modernist ideal of the "perfect
object." Like John Cage, he proposes that the artwork be responsive
to the viewer, rather than fixed and static. But Ascott takes
Cage's premise into the realm of computer-based art, suggesting
that the "spirit of cybernetics" offers the most effective means
for achieving a two-way exchange between the artwork and its
audience.
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